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TOWNIES

My father used to talk about the alligators in New York City’s sewage tunnels. He would talk about them full of certainty. They were there as certainly as there were bums in Grand Central. That was his New York: kind of fantastical, kind of dangerous. Read more…

When I meet a young woman, sometimes one of my students, sometimes a baby sitter, always creative, a little insecure, I often think of the day I found my wedding dress.

Picture Manhattan, the last early summer of the 20th century, the seventh floor at Bergdorf Goodman. Picture the Bridal Specialist — let’s call her Rachel — clutching her clipboard. Picture several Russian seamstresses with pins in their mouths — two at the hem, one overseeing. Picture the Mother — mine — and me: young, happy, tense. I’m in the Dress. Read more…

Before my fiancé, James, and I bought our first car, we discussed money, fantasy vacation homes, insurance, pleather, climate control, climate change and unborn children. But perhaps more important was what we didn’t discuss. And that was parking. We spent about 30 seconds on it.

James: “If we get a car, you are going to have to help park it on the street.”

Me: “I’m fine helping with the parking. Sometimes. I just don’t want to be responsible for moving it all the time.”

When I was 23, and living in San Francisco, I worked at a high-end design and jewelry store that not many people went into. One afternoon, as I was sitting at a desk with a phone that never seemed to ring, a man came in. He had a brown beard, a gas station cap and aviator sunglasses. A knapsack. He tripped over a stool, walked up to the desk, and pulled a nine-inch chef’s knife from the waistband of his pants. Later I would wonder about this. How had he been carrying it around, comfortably? Read more…

I was born and grew up in the late ’80s in a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side. In New York, apartments can be appealing for three reasons: size, location and cost. You hope to score in one of these categories. Sometimes you’re lucky enough to find a place with two. Three is unimaginable. Read more…

The story of how Danny and I were married last July in a Manhattan courtroom, with our son, Kevin, beside us, began 12 years earlier, in a dark, damp subway station.

Danny called me that day, frantic. “I found a baby!” he shouted. “I called 911, but I don’t think they believed me. No one’s coming. I don’t want to leave the baby alone. Get down here and flag down a police car or something.” By nature Danny is a remarkably calm person, so when I felt his heart pounding through the phone line, I knew I had to run.

When I got to the A/C/E subway exit on Eighth Avenue, Danny was still there, waiting for help to arrive. The baby, who had been left on the ground in a corner behind the turnstiles, was light-brown skinned and quiet, probably about a day old, wrapped in an oversize black sweatshirt. Read more…

The men native to the locker room of New York University’s Coles Sports and Recreation Center are a mixed bunch: old and young, fat and fit, smooth and hairy, N.Y.U. athletes, N.Y.U. professors, N.Y.U. administrators, the Polish, the Jewish, the Latino — each category with its complicated subdivisions, everyone in various stages of undress. The lockers are red and arranged somewhat symmetrically into U-shaped banks. Each locker bank has one low wooden bench running down its center where men sit, talking as they dress themselves, trying not to touch one another. Read more…

DRIVING across the George Washington Bridge in the spring of 2006, with everything I owned in the trunk and Manhattan shining in the distance, I might have been the most clichéd girl in America. I tried not to dwell on the fact that I had no money, no apartment, no job.

A friend was gracious enough to let me stay with her until I found a place of my own, and I immediately signed with a temp agency, hoping to find a job in publishing. One morning, my phone rang. It was Lori from the agency. “I have the perfect opportunity,” she said. “It’s on the sales side, and I know you’re looking for edit, but would you be interested?”

“Sure,” I said. Looking back, I remember thinking that this was the point where I thought I was being flexible. “What magazine is it for?”

Growing up, my brother and I spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house. They lived next door so when Mom and Dad worked weekends, it was up to them to keep us out of trouble. Most afternoons, we’d sprawl out on their living room floor in front of the television — the Chinese-language radio station going in the kitchen — while my grandfather paced the back garden or my grandmother sat on the porch with a bowl of alfalfa sprouts in her lap. Read more…

Washington, D.C., is a city of divides. There are racial divides, most notably a black D.C. and a white D.C. There are ethnic enclaves, with a Salvadoran D.C. sharing space with the Ethiopian D.C. There are the geographic boundaries that came to represent economic boundaries, like “east of the river” and “west of the park,” or the image divides between the tony Northwest section of the city and the formerly gritty Southeastern quadrant.

But to me, the most telling divide is a verbal one — does one live in D.C. or Washington? Read more…

Townies, a series about life in New York — and occasionally other cities — written by the novelists, journalists and essayists who live there, appears on Thursdays. This week features an essay by Sandy SooHoo, a freelance photographer and writer who is working on a collection of essays.